ye olde republicke

Saturday, June 20, 2015

I have for a while neglected this blog, for two reasons. One, and I know I've said this before, I have been invited by Will Truman to blog at his Hitcoffee site. The other is that I've been a bit more aggressive about writing guest posts at Ordinary Times.

I probably won't do a lot of cross-posting between here and at the other sites, mostly because I'm too lazy. I may, however, continue to post here from time to time on matters that are more "personal," perhaps even "experimental," and that I don't think the people at Hitcoffee or Ordinary Times would necessarily be interested in. Each of those sites has its own comment culture and "audience," and I want to respect that.

I still welcome comments here, and my email account, which I try to check at least once a weekday and usually on the weekend, too, notifies me when they're made.

Monday, April 6, 2015

In my last post,
I promised to write about Spanish persons' thoughts on politics. But
what I have to say is probably more about the process of observing
others' views and my wish to avoid at least some of the pitfalls when
doing so. In short, this post will be more about me than about Spain or
the Spanish.

First a preface. I'm aware of (many of) my
limitations. I know little of Spanish history beyond what anyone would
know after having taken two semesters of Western Civ. I probably know
even less about Spanish politics, and I haven't gone out of my way to
educate myself. I also spoke with only a few people in Spain. And
those people had their own motivations, their own biases, and their own
reasons for saying what they did. The language barrier probably also
prevented me from discerning much of the nuance of what they said--and
probably prevented me from even understanding much, although my wife was
there to translate. I write this because I don't want to be that guy
who goes to Europe or who has European friends and says, "they believe
x," and then uses that generalization as evidence in favor of their own
preferred policies in the US.

One of my wife's set of friends is a
family that is probably "middle class" in the sense of "people who do
non-manual and professional-like labor and are relatively better off
than most people" (and not in the American sense of "everybody who is
alive and not super poor or a billionaire"). They had a lot of
complaints about the government's restrictive laws for businesses. One
person wanted to start up an internet business and sell things online,
but the licensing and other regulations made it way too costly. That
family also seemed to be concerned that those regulations created a too
large black market economy.

That critique meshes pretty well with
my own neoliberal views. But my wife and I met others who probably
would have disagreed with her friends. For instance, one taxi driver we
met was upset, if I understood him correctly, over the Spanish
government's proposals to endorse austerity programs and taxes on
workers and over its complicity with German monetary policy. That taxi
driver, I assume from his comments but I'm also putting words into his
mouth, wanted to keep many of the regulations which he believed
protected workers like him but which my wife's other friends wanted to
lessen or liberalize.

The Spanish people I talked to seemed much
better informed about US politics than I was/am about Spanish or
European politics. While it's probably a bad thing for Americans not to
know as much about politics outside the US as they do about politics
within the US, I decline to chide my compatriots too much for their
ignorance, which as it happens is my ignorance, too. Spain is a
smaller, less powerful country than the US and and daily life in Spain
seems to be enmeshed in international affairs in more obvious, or at
least more obviously direct, ways than daily life in the US is. It's
not because Spanish people are more virtuous or American people are more
"anti-intellectual." It's largely because circumstances demand greater
attention to international matters.

Also, and with due respect to
the people I met, their knowledge of US politics seemed on some level
superficial. The people I talked to, not surprisingly (to me), disliked
George W. Bush and "the Republicans." One person said, if I understood
right, that the Republicans were the party of the past or the old guard
(I believe his word was "ancianos"....although I might be
misremembering or I might have misheard). However, I suspect, that the
persons I spoke with don't quite understand how our system of single
member district representation, along with our presidential
(non-parliamentary) system, works. In other words, I don't think they
fully realize that someone can vote for the Democrats or the Republicans
without necessarily supporting even most of that party's platform.

I
don't say this as an indictment against them. I have an even less firm
grasp on Spanish politics and how the Spanish government works. When I
saw mention on Spanish TV about "el presidente del gobierno," I thought
they were referring to something like a prime minister--and wikipedia
says I'm right--but I the word "presidente" tripped me up and for a
second I thought Spain had a presidential system like the US or a
presidential/parliament system like France. I'll repeat what I said
above. The Spanish people I met know more about the US government than
most Americans, including me, know about the Spanish government.

My
lesson from all this is the unsurprising one that people resemble each
other in their propensity to frame things in ways they can understand
and that supports their own biases. The Spanish are human, just like
me. That lesson seems corny or even "awe shucks-y," but the fact that I
"learned" that lesson means that I had a caricature of what it meant to
be European or Spanish or non-American. And now that caricature is
less strong. (I'll concede that, as commenter David Alexander suggested
in my last thread, I'd have a chance to learn even more lessons if I
had gone to India or Saudi Arabia. I don't claim that my 9 days as a
tourist in a western country necessarily exposes me to difference.)

In
other words, and still not surprisingly, travel might help expose
people to other worldviews in a way that my own provincialism does not.
I don't mean provincialism as a self-deprecating epithet, either. I
have a lot of reservations about cosmopolitanism and about "travel
culture" and I believe those reservations still have merit. When one
cuts oneself off from the local, one loses something and the loss is
real. But going to Spain has demonstrated that those reservations have
their limits and that if the loss is real, so is the gain.

Saturday, April 4, 2015

My wife and I just returned from our honeymoon in Spain. (We had
actually gotten married about two years ago, but for a variety of
reasons we’ve had to wait until now.) Here are some of my
observations/thoughts.

1. I had never been to Europe or to any country other than the US or
Canada before our trip. It was weird to be crossing the Atlantic,
knowing that what once had been a great barrier could be crossed in
hours.

2. My Spanish is very poor. I can understand my wife (who speaks it
well), but my ability to speak the language is, err, “challenged.”
Still, I was surprised at how much I was able to understand when others
spoke it. It was also interesting to hear the use of
“vosotros”/”vosotras” and what is known as the “Castillian lisp.” I
knew both features marked Iberian Spanish from the American Spanish I’m
more used to. But it was interesting to hear it in person.

3. I was oddly surprised at how much American influence was evident
in the culture. I say “oddly” because I knew/know that American culture
has a pretty wide reach and that Europe is in that “western” mold. But
still, it was striking to me how much Spain seemed like the US. The
fact we were in only two locales may have affected my impression. We
stayed in what is probably downtown Madrid, although we visited some
friends of my wife in a more residential area of that city. We also
stayed in Santiago de Compostela, in what is probably the touristy part
(where the big Cathedral is). We visited some friends there, too, but
they lived nearby that area.

4. The disaster with the Lufthansa airplane happened the day before
we left for Spain. My wife and I had both read about it, but declined
to mention it to the other for fear that it would make the other nervous
about the flight. We thought we were keeping it a secret. However,
Spanish media covered the disaster quite extensively. (The plane had
taken off from Barcelona). I’m not sure how the coverage there compares
to coverage in the US, or how it compares with coverage of other air
disasters, like the TWA 800 flight in 1996. (I mention that flight
because my niece knew two of the people who died.)
In my next post, I’ll make a couple of observations about what little I grokked of Spanish persons’ thoughts on politics.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

This post is about "Family Guy," and I promise I'll get
there.But first I'll start with a long
passage from George Orwell's 1984
(hat tip, Eric Blair).Toward the beginning of the novel, the
protagonist, Winston Smith, writes the following in his diary [bold added by
me]:

"April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks.
All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed
somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great
huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw
him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the
helicopters gunsights, then he was full
of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though
the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank.
then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it.
there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow
with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with
fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow
right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him
although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much
as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the
helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat
went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going
up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have
followed it up and there was a lot of
applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house
suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it
not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint
until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to
her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never "

Now back to "Family Guy."I'm not sure it's okay to watch the show.I like it.I don't watch it much anymore, but that's mostly because it's on at inconvenient
times for me.But it's hard to know
whether I should laugh at the humor.

Or some of the humor.Many of its
jokes are pretty innocent.Take the
scene where an errant golf ball crashes through a china shop and destroys all
the porcelain vases and other breakable things.A bull, who had been in the china shop innocently browsing the wares,
now faces blame from the owner who was in a back room and didn't see what
caused all the damage. (Sorry, I can't
seem to find a YouTube link to it, but it's funnier if you watch it than if you
read my description.)Some of the humor also
strikes me as decent social commentary.When Peter meets the crows
from Dumbo and makes his comment about "good ole fashioned family
racism" [not really offensive, but probably not safe for work], it's
hard to deny he's on to something.There
are also a lot of fart jokes that aren't really my thing but are harmless.

But some humor crosses the line.Take the scene where a barbershop quartet makes fun of an AIDS patient,
or the repeated jokes about and abuse toward Meg, or the neighborhood pedophile
character.Everyone's mileage varies and
the line-crossing jokes can sometimes be argued to have a point beyond harming
others for the sake of laughter.Examples
[not safe for work]:here, here, and here.

Finding the point—finding the justification for the humor—requires us to
rely on irony.We don't really think
that it's appropriate to make fun of someone with a terminal illness.We don't really think bullying a teenage girl
is a good thing to do.We don't really
find pedophilia funny.Instead, we (by
which I mean, "me and others," because this is something I do) say
it's so bad it's funny.In fact, it's
funny precisely because it's so bad, because we would never do those things or
condone them being done outside movies or tv, or at least outside the cartoon
world.It's the type of thing we laugh
at everyday.We might also say that
"Family Guy" is "an equal opportunity lampooner."I have problems with that argument, both as a
general argument and in the particular case of "Family Guy."

But how can we be sure that our laughter or enjoyment is not just another
way of performing cruelty?It's not
right to make fun of people with terminal illnesses, but there was a time not
too long ago when it was okay or at least not beyond the pale in at least some
otherwise respectable circles to make jokes about "the gay
disease."Bullying isn't funny
except when it is.How many times have I
made a comment on the internet that I believed to be funny but was probably on
some level bullying?(Answer, probably
at least a few.)Pedophilia and other
forms of sexual abuse isn't funny, but I suspect a goodly number of people here
have occasionally laughed at "prison rape" jokes or whatnot.

Most people who make such jokes or who find troublesome things to be funny
aren't sociopaths.But I'm not so sure
that sociopaths don't make such jokes.And while it's a fallacy to say that because Socrates is a man,
therefore all men are Socrates, the family resemblance between "Family
Guy" humor and what cruel people do and probably laugh about is disconcerting
to me.Think of the bullies you may have
known or people who have punched down (or even up) at you and the jokes they
tell.I'm not so sure they don't tell
themselves they're not laughing at the person or the disability or the racial
or sexual identity.I wouldn't be surprised
if they say instead that they're just laughing at the irony of it all.

I began this post with the Orwell quotation for a reason.What Winston Smith observed at the movie
theater is what I'm suggesting happens with "Family Guy."What entertainment we consume and partake in
is also part of what we put out there and might very well contribute to a
violent project.Think of the history of
blackface minstrel shows, which arose during slavery and flourished during Jim
Crow.

The analogy is not perfect.I wouldn't be surprised if in Smith's dystopic world, people are required
to watch such movies whereas in our real world we have a choice whether or not
to watch "Family Guy."And Jim
Crow has been dismantled, at least formally.There's also the idea that as consumers of entertainment we are
detached.We suspend disbelief.And in so doing we are, as I noted above,
"laughing at the irony of it all."

Am I just being puritanical?Not in the
Menckenian sense of the word.I'm
not tsk-tsk'ing.I'm not arguing that "Family
Guy" should be banned.I'm not endorsing
a letter-writing campaign or boycott to get it off the air.I'm not even urging anyone else not to watch
it.I'll probably watch it or reruns someday
in the future.

Maybe I am being puritan in another sense, though.I believe that what we--by which, again, I
mean "you and I"--perform and do is part of who we are and shapes
what we become.I resist calling that
"puritanism" because doing so seems to imply that only puritans care
about such things.

And we should consider what we laugh at.It's not always an easy call.The "prole" in Smith's passage might
be on to something.

Free will in the marketplace is a useful construct.But it's a construct nevertheless and can't
explain everything.

About 15 years ago, I was interested in joining a gym.There was one near where I worked—it's part
of a national chain that I'll call "23-Hour Fitness."*I went there on my 30-minute lunch break to
check out their prices.What I got was
an aggressive sales pitch that lasted about 45 minutes.They gave me a tour of the place and a sit
down discussion over the various "membership options," which varied
so slightly in price and services that it was hard tell the differences among
them.When the people I was speaking
with couldn't find a "membership rep" (who, apparently, was the only
one there with authority to sign me up), I finally made my escape, telling them
I had to get back to work.

This may seem weird to someone who hasn't experienced a
similar ordeal or who has a stronger will than I do. But I felt guilty about
leaving them without signing up, almost as if I had unfairly taken their time
only to leave them in the lurch at the last minute.In fact, if they had found a "membership
rep," odds are at least even that I would have signed up just to leave
with a clear conscience.And for the
record, I knew in the first 5 or 10 minutes that I didn't want to join at all.

What if I had signed and wanted out?There probably were (and are) some consumer
protection policies that could have helped me.Maybe a grace period of 3 days.Maybe a cause of action in small claims court or other court.Maybe some government consumer protection
commission.There probably also were
(and are) some non-governmental opportunities.I could have gone to the "consumers' advocate" that most local
media seem to have.I could have gone to
the Better Business Bureau.I could have
closed my checking account to prevent the automatic debits.

I'm not confident most of those things would have worked or
that I would have availed myself of them.I can imagine feeling just as intimidated going in on day two of the
grace period and speaking with these same folks as I had during the signup
meeting.And I wouldn't even know how to
pursue a claim in court.And the media
option is luck of the draw (they probably get scores of complaints a month and
can follow up only on a handful) while the BBB option amounts to a harmless
tsk-tsk against the offending company.(Closing the checking account might have worked, but I'll leave that
aside because it's not convenient to my narrative.)

My point, though, is that I might have done something
because I felt compelled to even though I "knew" that I had no
obligation to do it and "knew" doing it was a bad idea for me.That's a problem.But I'm not sure what solution—policy
solution or otherwise—can adequately resolve that problem, where
"adequately" means, I suppose, that which would protect others
similarly situated.Grace periods can be
lengthened.Causes of action can be made
easier to pursue in court.Etc.

Some solutions are better than others.I wouldn't ban gym contracts, for
example.And something is to be said for
an adult taking responsibility for her or his actions.And at the end of the day I guess the
important thing is I didn't sign, and the problem (for me, in that instance) is
hypothetical.

*Disclosure:23-Hour
Fitness is not necessarily related to any organization with a similar sounding
name.